Thomas Henry Huxley

Thomas Henry Huxley, (born May 4, 1825, Ealing, Middlesex, England—died June 29, 1895, Eastbourne, Sussex), English biologist, educator, and advocate of agnosticism (he coined the word). Huxley’s vigorous public support of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism earned him the nickname “Darwin’s bulldog,” while his organizational efforts, public lectures, and writing helped elevate the place of science in modern society.

Student life

Thomas Henry Huxley, born above a butcher’s shop, was the youngest of the six surviving children of schoolmaster George Huxley and his wife, Rachel. Although Huxley received only two years (1833–35) of formal education at his father’s declining Ealing School, its evangelicalism later marked his scientific rhetoric. From 1835 his father tried managing a bank in his native Coventry, which left Huxley footloose in the ribbon-weaving city. Huxley’s parents were Anglicans (members of the Church of England), but the boy sympathized with the town’s Nonconformist (or Dissenting) weavers, who wanted religious equality and an end to the Anglicans’ control of public institutions. Fascinated by science and religion, he studied Unitarian works, whose cause-and-effect explanations and denial of the duality of spirit and matter challenged the socially conservative views dominant in natural history and natural theology. Thomas Carlyle’s books taught Huxley that the religious feeling of awe was distinct from theology, which dealt with gods and miraculous events. The teenager speculated (as did radical Dissenters) that morality was a cultural product, which left it open to a scientific explanation. These were the seeds of Huxley’s agnosticism, scientific enthusiasm, and understanding of sectarian power play.

The longhaired student was apprenticed (c. 1838–41) to his sister Ellen’s beer-swilling husband, John Charles Cooke, a medical materialist. Transferred to a London dockside practitioner early in 1841, Huxley was shaken by the lives of his pauper patients. Even at the backstreet anatomy school where Huxley took the botany prize in 1842—Sydenham College, off Gower Street in London—there was no escaping sectarian politics and science; Sydenham’s owner, Marshall Hall, was studying mechanistic reflex arcs while haranguing the Royal College of Physicians for excluding Dissenters from its fellowship.

On a free scholarship (1842–45) to Charing Cross Hospital, London, Huxley won medals in physiology and organic chemistry. His own mechanistic bent showed as he sought to explain living processes by physicochemical laws, and his superb microscopy was revealed in his discovery in 1845 of a new membrane, now known as Huxley’s layer, in the human hair sheath.

The Rattlesnake voyage

To repay his debts, he entered the navy and served (1846–50) as assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake surveying Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea. With his microscope lashed to a table in the chart room, he studied the structure and growth of sea anemones, hydras, jellyfish, and sea nettles such as the Portuguese man-of-war, which decomposed too quickly to be studied anywhere except on the high seas. He grouped them together as Nematophora (named for their stinging cells), although they were later classified as the phylum Cnidaria (or Coelenterata). Demonstrating that they were all composed of two “foundation membranes” (shortly to be called endoderm and ectoderm), he even suggested that these membranes were related to the two original cell layers in the vertebrate embryo. The aristocratic Captain Owen Stanley, commander of the Rattlesnake, posted Huxley’s papers to his father, the bishop of Norwich, for London publication; but such old-style patronage galled Huxley, who insisted that science no longer needed aristocratic sanction.

A whirlwind romance in Sydney in 1847 left the sailor engaged to a brewer’s daughter, Henrietta (“Nettie”) Anne Heathorn. By now Huxley considered it a moral duty to weigh the evidence before believing church dogmas, and his skepticism worried Nettie. He sailed to the Great Barrier Reef and southern coast of New Guinea, sketched Papuans, and suffered terrible mental collapses in the broiling heat of the Coral Sea as he worried about the worth of his scientific work. But he continued his pathbreaking observations, noting that the larval sea squirt has tail muscles like a tadpole’s. This, in later years, would be part of the proof that sea squirts, or ascidians, are the ancestors of the vertebrates.

Huxley returned home in 1850, hoping to earn enough to bring Nettie to England. His success at the Royal Society of London testified to the meteoric rise of his scientific reputation: elected a fellow in 1851, he was its Royal Medal winner in 1852 and a councillor in 1853. But it was all praise and no pudding, he fumed. Although the British Treasury put him on half pay to finish his research (which appeared in 1859 as The Oceanic Hydrozoa), Huxley could not find an academic post in science. Such jobs were rare when Britain’s Oxbridge-trained leaders studied classics and when the public (privately funded) schools considered science dehumanizing. This led Huxley to more crushing depressions and a desire to raise science to a paying profession. Huxley took sides on the controversial issues of the day. He insisted that sea nettles were individual organisms, not colonies. He denied that the skull was composed of vertebrae, as his rival, the comparative anatomist Richard Owen, believed. Following the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, Huxley challenged the view that fossils showed a progression through the rocks, and he went on to repudiate a Christian-based geology that made humans the culmination of Creation. Marian Evans (the novelist George Eliot), writing alongside Huxley on the rationalist Westminster Review, an influential magazine at the cutting edge of 19th-century literary Britain, saw his brilliance as counterpoised by a love of provocation.

After four increasingly difficult years, Huxley’s professional fortunes improved in 1854. He began teaching natural history and paleontology at the Government School of Mines in Piccadilly, central London. With a new professional ethos sweeping the country, Huxley trained schoolmasters in science and fostered a meritocratic, exam-based approach to education and professional advancement. He simultaneously occupied chairs at the Royal Institution and the Royal College of Surgeons, and he organized public lectures for workers, themselves looking for a new, liberating science. His situation stabilized, he brought Nettie to England, and their eight-year engagement ended with their marriage in 1855.

Charles Darwin, about to start writing his On the Origin of Species (1859), saw Huxley’s star rising. A visit to Darwin’s Down House in 1856 laid the foundation for a long relationship between the two men and their families (Nettie recuperated at Down after the death of her firstborn, Noel, in 1860; she and Emma Darwin shared concerns over their husbands’ scientific theorizing and its theological consequences; and the Darwins stood as godparents to two of the Huxleys’ eight children). Charles Darwin and Huxley, meanwhile, complemented each other perfectly. The reclusive Darwin needed a public champion and defender. Huxley had initial difficulty with natural selection itself and opted for an internal source of variation that could produce new species at a stroke. Nonetheless, he saw Darwin’s naturalistic (i.e., nonmiraculous) approach as a valuable aid in his campaign to build an independent scientific elite unfettered by the constraints of the old order. Therefore, rather than shy away from the controversial aspects of evolutionary theory, Huxley played them up, using Darwin’s Origin of Species as a “Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.” Unlike some contemporaries (such as Saint George Jackson Mivart) who sought a reconciliation between science and theology, he framed the debate over Creation and evolution in black-and-white, either/or terms and was unforgiving of colleagues who straddled the fence.

A defining moment in this professional campaign came early, in an exchange with the conservative bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1860. Wilberforce apparently asked whether the apes were on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s line (a tasteless joke by Victorian standards), to which Huxley—exuding Puritan virtue—replied that he would rather have an ape as an ancestor than a wealthy bishop who prostituted his gifts. Although Darwinian propagandists, in continually recounting this episode, helped to put the men of science on an intellectual par with the powerful clergy, the reality was more complicated. At Oxford, Huxley was supported by some liberal Anglican clergy who disliked the hard-line bishop, and Wilberforce himself subsequently worked alongside Huxley at the Zoological Society. Nor did Huxley shy away from appropriating religious authority when it suited his purposes; he spoke of developing a “church scientific” and arranged for Darwin to be buried at Westminster Abbey.

Huxley carried the standard of scientific naturalism and evolution on a number of battlefields. He challenged the notion of supernatural creation, informing his democratic artisans that humans had risen from animals—a lowly-ancestor-bright-future image that appealed to the downtrodden—and that Darwin’s Nature was a book open for all to read, rather than the prerogative of priests. He plunged headlong into the inflammatory issue of human ancestry; Darwin avoided it, but Huxley made it his specialty. In 1861 he denied that human and ape brains differ significantly, sparking a raging dispute with Richard Owen that brought human evolution to public attention. He discussed ape ancestry and the new fossil Neanderthal man in Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863). Huxley also turned to fossils, working first on crossopterygians (Devonian lobe-fin fishes, the ancestors of amphibians) and the crocodile-shaped amphibians disinterred in Britain’s coal pits. But his coup came in 1867–68, as he achieved a better understanding of phylogeny, or life’s fossil pathway, when after reclassifying birds according to their palate bones, he proceeded to show that all birds were descended from small carnivorous dinosaurs.

Power and “Pope Huxley”

Huxley’s controversial positions in the 1860s and ’70s won the support of an increasing number of his contemporaries, while his research established him as one of the leading scientists of his era. As a scientific popularizer he was without peer, and he was an energetic organizer and political infighter. These qualities gave Huxley the levers necessary to elevate the position of science in British society, and he helped to build a social order in which science and professionalism replaced classics and patronage.

He did not fight alone. With the Kew Gardens botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, the physicist John Tyndall, and other former outsiders, Huxley formed the X-Club in 1864 to advance science. Within a decade they were parceling out Royal Society posts. Their mouthpiece was the Reader—in which Huxley, answering Conservative leader Benjamin Disraeli’scriticism of Darwinism, notoriously claimed that science would achieve “domination over the whole realm of the intellect”—and Nature (founded in 1869 by Huxley’s team). Huxley also served as president of the Geological Society (1869–71), the Ethnological Society (1868–71), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1870), the Marine Biological Association (1884–90), and the Royal Society (1883–85). With seats on 10 Royal Commissions, deliberating on everything from fisheries to diseases to vivisection, he had clearly penetrated the labyrinthine corridors of power.

Those corridors shuddered at the growing strength of the rival industrial powers Germany and the United States. Huxley and his circle argued that better scientific education and support for scientific research would produce the workers and innovations necessary to maintain British supremacy. Huxley spent much of the 1860s and ’70s immersed in educational reform and institution building. He joined the Eton College governing board and the London School Board (1870–72), devising a modern curriculum suitable for both the sons of privilege and the capital’s “street arabs.” He likewise served as rector (1872–74) of the ancient University of Aberdeen and principal (1868–80) of the new Working Men’s College in south London. As a member (1870–75) of the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction, he recommended the fusion of his Government School of Mines with the Royal College of Chemistry; they were moved to South Kensington and renamed the Normal School of Science (ultimately the Imperial College of Science and Technology, now part of the University of London). He advised on the founding of a vocational Central Institution for Technical Education (opened in London in 1884), for which he was made a freeman of the City of London in 1883. To fill the demand for science teachers (driven in part by the Education Act of 1870), he taught courses at South Kensington for schoolmasters and mistresses (the latter did so well that he was inspired to fight for the admission of women to universities), and he set the Department of Science and Art’s public exams. His exam invigilators were Royal Engineers (the construction workers at South Kensington), which gave his “warfare” image of science with theology its deeper military aura. Not for nothing did the students nickname him “the General.”

His popularity grew with his political influence. Huxley’s talks were headline grabbers. The provocation and the handsome looks drew enormous crowds; once, in 1866, as he gave a talk on blind faith as the ultimate sin, the evangelist of science saw 2,000 people turned away from the crammed hall. A bequest of £1,000 from a Quaker supporter financed Huxley’s American tour in 1876, on which he gave talks about the birds’ dinosaur ancestry, made the succession of fossil horses in America the “Demonstrative Evidence of Evolution,” and was dubbed “Huxley Eikonoklastes” by a New York City paper. (Huxley’s whistle-stop tours led his children to call him “the lodger” at home.) No less popular were his writings. He took readers through time tunnels to experience exotic past worlds. An essay on protoplasm as the substrate of life sent the Fortnightly Review into seven editions in 1869. His numerous introductory textbooks were well received. Such prodigious activity on so many fronts led to continual breakdowns and recuperations in Egypt, Germany, Italy, and France. In addition, his pay never quite sufficed, as he financed the children of his broken-down brother James and drunken sister Ellen. And the more he upheld family values and denied that skepticism and evolutionism led to debauchery, the more he worried about scandals breaking around his ne’er-do-well relations.

In 1869 he coined the word agnostic, meaning that one could know nothing of ultimate reality, whether spiritual or material. For him morality rested not in reciting creeds but in weighing evidence for events; it was a consecration of doubt that vested his new professionals with the priests’ old power. (For such messianic pronouncements he was nicknamed “Pope Huxley.”) His research, meanwhile, became increasingly influenced by evolution. He used the fishlike lancelet (amphioxus) to plumb the origin of all vertebrates, tackled crayfish evolution, showed that Mesozoic crocodiles progressively developed a secondary palate (which allowed them to drown newly evolved mammalian prey), and wrote the section on evolution in biology in the article “Evolution” for the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (published 1878). Finally, in creating a package that the teachers could take to their hometowns, Huxley forged the discipline of biology—based on structural (rather than evolutionary) anatomy, stripped down to a few exemplary animal and plant “types.”

The old lion

With a radical home secretary making Huxley an inspector of fisheries in 1881, his pay was finally augmented. But so was the strain. The final blow came as his talented daughter Marian went mad after 1882 (she died in Paris, under the care of the renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, in 1887). A distraught, overworked Huxley resigned his professorship at the Normal School of Science (the future novelist H.G. Wells sat his last course) and the presidency of the Royal Society in 1885. He was awarded a state pension of £1,200 a year by the Liberal prime ministerWilliam Ewart Gladstone, even though Huxley—ever the polemicist—struck out against Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule policy, dissected his scriptural literalism, and refuted his attempt to reconcile the fossil evidence with the order of Creation listed in the book of Genesis.

Grieving for his daughter, Huxley in “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society” (1887) adopted a bitter social Darwinism—a term that would itself be introduced about 1890. Accepting Darwin’s Malthusian belief that overpopulation was the rule, Huxley maintained that the inevitable struggle and death undermined any possibility of socialist cooperation, which was back in contention after the socialist revival of 1886. He was answered by the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid (1902). Huxley also nationalized the Darwinian struggle; he saw the industrial powers competing, making workforce training obligatory to win the economic “battle.” His last major talk was on “Evolution and Ethics” at the University of Oxford in 1893. Mellower now, six years after Marian’s death, Huxley used the occasion to detach benign human ethics from natural competition. Darwin’s “war”—between animals or industrial nations—had no place in our personal lives, he said. Society grows as we curb these “anti-social” animal instincts—it advances through the selection of individuals who are ethically the best, rather than physically the fittest.

Huxley suffered from pleurisy and heart disease in London’s smog, and the family moved to Eastbourne, on the Sussex coast, in 1890. Huxley was now an elder statesman of science, his once-radical ideas the foundations of the new Establishment. Agnosticism was equated with nonsectarianism; a lord chief justice in 1883 declared that Christianity was no longer the law of the land in England, with the caveat that while Huxley’s reverent questioning was now legal, vulgar working-class attacks on Christian beliefs were still indictable. Huxley’s brand of national Darwinism turned science against socialism and made naturalism synonymous with patriotism. The professions, including those in science, were accumulating power. He was also patriarch of an expanding intellectual dynasty. His son Leonard was a prominent editor, and three grandchildren would earn their own fame: Julian and Andrew as biologists and Aldous as a writer. It was this Huxley, as much a Unionist and nationalist as a brilliant propagandist for science, who was appointed to the Privy Council by the Conservative prime minister Robert Cecil, 3rd marquis of Salisbury, in 1892.

And so it was the Right Honourable Huxley who died of a heart attack on June 29, 1895—typically, midway through a defense of agnosticism. Huxley was buried on July 4, 1895, next to his tiny son Noel in St. Marylebone Cemetery, in Finchley, north London, his funeral being attended by a constellation of the greatest Victorian scientists.